They hurled expletives, executives, and shoes – and that was just the pre-fight press conference.
Then on Jan. 3, 2015, the world’s top two light heavyweights finally stepped in the cage at UFC 182 in a battle for supremacy that would pit their opposing styles and personalities – in fact, their entirely different ways of being – against one another.
Did it settle anything? Yes and no. [autotag]Jon Jones[/autotag] was still the UFC light-heavyweight champ in the end. [autotag]Daniel Cormier[/autotag] went home with the first loss of his pro career. Any hope that they might bury the hatchet and end up as unlikely friends evaporated when Jones went on the FOX Sports 1 post-event show to express his sincere hope that Cormier was “somewhere crying right now,” which in fact he was.
What looked at first like it might be the end of a bitter rivalry turned out instead to be the end of the beginning. Within a matter of months, Cormier would be champ and Jones would be jailed. And the carousel still wasn’t done spinning.
The story of how this great rivalry started is so dumb that it has to be true. According to both men, they first came face to face backstage at a UFC event in 2010. Cormier was the Olympic wrestler new to MMA and competing as a heavyweight. Jones was the wunderkind on his way to the UFC light-heavyweight title.
“I came up to (Cormier) with a big smile on my face,” Jones recalled later. “He’s another black guy in the sport, and I felt the need to say hello to him, and I was just like ‘Hey man, I hear you’re a great wrestler’ and all this stuff. And he’s like ‘Yeah, yeah, you don’t know who I am?’ I’m like ‘No, I don’t know who you are, but my coaches were telling me that you wrestle on the Olympic level.’ And I was like ‘I bet you that I could take you down.’ It was my way of trying to develop a new friendship, and he just took it so seriously, and he was just so offended that I didn’t know who he was, and from that moment on, he decided that there was a beef between us.”
Cormier, while not disputing the essential facts of Jones’ version of their first meeting, remembered the incident somewhat differently.
“What I said was, ‘How do you break the ice by insulting someone?’” Cormier said. “That’s the only problem I had. It was the first time he and I ever interacted. He walked up to me, a very tall individual. He looked down on me and started to make derogatory comments toward me, talking about how he could take me down easy and stuff. … You don’t even know who I am, guy!”
They’d get acquainted soon enough. Jones became the youngest champ in UFC history the following year, while Cormier entered the Strikeforce heavyweight grand prix as an alternate and then won the whole thing in 2012 shortly after the UFC’s parent company purchased the promotion.
But heavyweight was a fraught prospect for Cormier in the UFC. His friend and teammate Cain Velasquez was the on-again, off-again champion, and he worried that he was too small to hang around in the division longterm. Before defeating Roy Nelson in his second bout with the UFC, Cormier announced he’d be moving down a division for his next fight. That plan seemed almost guaranteed to put him on a collision course with Jones.
Still, it took an injury to Alexander Gustafsson to finally bring the men together. After the Swedish contender withdrew from his planned rematch with Jones at UFC 178, Cormier, who by then had racked up two straight wins at 205 pounds, was more than happy to step in.
To promote the fight, the UFC scheduled them for a press conference in the lobby of MGM Grand in Las Vegas that August. Normally this would have been the kind of thing that Dana White would have presided over, but the UFC president was en route to Bali for a family vacation, according to former UFC Vice President of Public Relations Dave Sholler, who filled in for him that day.
The press conference went well right up until Jones and Cormier came together for the customary photo op face-off at the end. As Sholler recalled later, there was something about the way Jones strode across the stage with the belt over his shoulder.
“I’ll never forget going, ‘This doesn’t feel right,’” Sholler said.
When Jones took off his sunglasses and stepped close to Cormier, pressing his forehead into the challenger’s face, Cormier put both hands on Jones’ neck and shoved him back (watch above). Jones didn’t hesitate to respond, dropping his title belt and advancing on Cormier, pausing just long enough to throw Sholler out of the way when he tried to intervene.
“The one thing I remember is grabbing Jon Jones by the bicep and for some reason thinking I was going to stop him,” Sholler said later.
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He didn’t. Few people on earth could have in that moment. And while several flooded the stage to try, Jones let fly with a left hand as the melee swirled off the stage and onto the lobby floor. Cormier would later throw a shoe in Jones’ general direction, just to give you a sense of how quickly all sense of order broke down.
Even when they were separated for an ESPN interview later on, the enmity boiled over – both on- an off-air – with Jones waffling between his public and private personas as he taunted an incredulous Cormier:
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For the UFC, it was a godsend. The press-conference brawl hyped the fight almost to the point of ruining it (Jones was later fined by the Nevada State Athletic Commission and assigned community service as punishment), and the end result was a media frenzy that only drew more attention to the pairing, all while producing more incendiary footage for future use.
Unfortunately for the UFC, an injury to Jones forced a postponement, moving the bout from UFC 178 to UFC 182. By that time, some of the mainstream interest in the fight may have cooled. But for the fighters, it was still easily the biggest bout of either man’s career.
The fight went down at MGM Grand Garden Arena, the same building where they’d brawled in the lobby some four months earlier. The promos for the event featured Cormier explaining that his journey through MMA was a search for the man who would prove to be his equal.
The first indication that he may have found it came in the fight’s opening minute, when Jones caught a Cormier kick and then swept his other leg out from under him. It was the first takedown Cormier had ever conceded in his 16-fight pro career.
For Cormier, it soon became apparent that the challenge would be not just getting inside Jones’ famous reach, but doing damage once he got there. He spent much of the early part of the fight trying to bull his way past the sharp elbows and stinging left hands of Jones, only to get hammered by knees when he managed to get close.
Still, by the end of the first round, Cormier was finding his range and landing punches. In the second he started attacking Jones’ body with kicks and knees, and Jones consented to spend more time fighting in close where Cormier could reach him.
“That’s the dog fight I want!” Cormier’s coach Javier Mendez told him in the corner between rounds.
But Jones was unrelenting. He attacked with kicks from distance, with elbows in close. He suffocated Cormier against the fence in the clinch, and little by little he seemed to be taking over the fight.
When he came back to his corner before the fourth, Cormier’s coaches implored him to increase his output.
“Do you want this?” Mendez asked.
“I’m trying,” Cormier replied.
But as the fight wore on, the variety of Jones’ attacks seemed to wear on Cormier. He took Cormier down two more times in the fourth round, then threw him to the mat a third time at the horn.
Cormier’s coaches, clad in T-shirts that read “Break Bones,” informed him that he needed to finish Jones if he wanted to win. An exhausted Cormier could only nod his head before marching back into the battle he was now clearly losing.
In the final minute of the fifth, Cormier finally managed a takedown only to have Jones immediately pop back to his feet. When he kept trying to dig for a single-leg takedown in the last seconds of the fight, Jones smiled and raised his fists, celebrating rather than defending.
When Cormier gave up on the takedown just before the horn, Jones snapped back into the fight just long enough to sneak in a couple more punches before it ended. A frustrated Cormier fired back after the horn, nearly clipping referee Herb Dean with a right hand. Jones responded in the universal language of pro wrestling gestures.
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The scorecards were no surprise. All three judges gave the fight to Jones with scores of 49-46. In his post-fight interview, Jones encouraged the people who’d bought Cormier’s “Break Bones” shirts to seek a refund.
“See what this shirt says?” Jones asked, gesturing to his own. “By Reebok, it says ‘unbroken.’ This team is unbroken. And still.”
As he gloated over his takedown edge in the fight, Jones paused just long enough to apologize for his own behavior.
“I’m sorry I’m being classless right now,” he said. “I do not like ‘DC,’ and this is why I’m being this way.”
He would continue taunting his beaten opponent in further post-fight interviews. Cormier found his way backstage, where he was embraced by his teammate Velasquez while UFC cameras watched.
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At the time, the fight seemed to close an important chapter. Jones was the better fighter. Cormier was stuck in second place. Secure in this knowledge, we could all move on.
The picture was complicated when, three days after the fight, NSAC executive director Bob Bennett confirmed that Jones had tested positive for a metabolite of cocaine in the weeks before the bout. The news was paired with an announcement that Jones would enter rehab, where he wound up staying for all of one night.
That April, Jones would be arrested following a hit-and-run accident in Albuquerque, N.M., that left a pregnant woman with a broken arm. This was bad news for his next planned title defense against Anthony Johnson. Soon after, the UFC announced that Jones had been stripped of the belt and suspended “indefinitely.”
The title fight at UFC 187 in May, however, would go on as planned. But with Jones out of the picture, Cormier again got the call. This time, he went home with the belt. He’d wind up keeping it for two more years, right up until he met Jones in the rematch at UFC 214, where he was knocked out in the third round.
At least, that was the preliminary result, until it was announced that Jones had failed another drug test – this time for the steroid Turinabol. Just like that, thanks to another Jones screwup, Cormier was champion again. And so the carousel spun around again. It is spinning still.
“Today in MMA History” is an MMAjunkie series created in association with MMA History Today, the social media outlet dedicated to reliving “a daily journey through our sport’s history.”
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